Dawgman.com's Luke Mounger spoke Wednesday with Washington Defensive End Psalm Wooching as the Huskies get ready to travel south for another road game - this one in Corvallis to face the Oregon State Beavers.

On his face paint “I’m Samoan and in the islands before you go to battle you put on your face; you mark up your face. Whether it’s Samoan, Maori, Hawaiian, all of those. Before we go to battle we have our face tattooed or our face paint on. Every game I try to implement that in my kind of way. I can’t go out there and get a tattoo on my face and run out there but I can use the modern day things. My face paint is what I can do.”

On if it’s eye black “Yeah, just eye black.”

On if he does the same face paint every time “No I try to do different every time. But I’ll usually black out my eyes for sure.”

On if there are certain meanings to different designs or if it’s just a creative thing “Just a creative thing for me. Sometimes I’ll put the eyes like this and two lines down from inside of my eye. That represents a Cheetah for me, you know, how their eyes look. That game I’m working on all speed so I’m using that. That’s all in my mindset. Speed, speed, speed like a Cheetah. Sometimes I’ll put a Husky, kind of like a scrape mark down my face. That’s just reminding me strength and relentlessness.”

On his involvement in rugby “Yeah. I play for the UW club team. The first year I came in we won the national championship for our division. We went down to Utah and got that so it was cool to play with the boys.”

On a summary of his time at UW “It’s been awesome. Coming in as a fullback playing offense and then transitioning to defense. I think it’s one of my favorite transitions in sports. Coming in on offense thinking I’m going to run the ball a lot. In this offense, not this one but the past offense, was not using the fullback as much as I thought it was. So asking Coach Petersen when he came to switch to the ‘BUCK’ linebacker was awesome. Just kind of getting to play kind of like free roam again, football again and just let loose instead of all these assignments and waiting for my name to be called on offense.”

On if the defensive mentality better suits his game “Yeah. Like I said, I’m a rugby player at heart and their aggressive defense. Plus I’m Samoan and we’re really aggressive on the field in any sport. I feel like defense just fit me better.”